Influence and Scholarship

The measure of Nicodemus’s legacy and the literature that studies it: the worldwide Philokalic revival of the twentieth century, by which his Athonite anthology reshaped Orthodox and even non-Orthodox spirituality; his place as a forerunner of the neo-patristic synthesis and of the modern recovery of hesychasm and Palamism; the diaspora channels (Russian, Greek, and English-speaking) through which his work spread; and the modern scholarship — Constantine Cavarnos, Elia Citterio, Bishop Chrysostomos, and the source-critical and historical studies — that has examined his life, his vast output, and his contested use of Western sources.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

The Philokalic Revival

The single greatest fact of Nicodemus’s legacy is the worldwide Philokalic revival of the twentieth century. The anthology he compiled with St. Makarios in 1782 (see Compiling the Philokalia), after its long passage through Slavonic and Russian, reached the English-speaking world in the complete translation of Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware (1979–) and became one of the most influential works of Christian spirituality of the age (see The Philokalia and Its Diffusion). The recovery of hesychast prayer — the Jesus Prayer, watchfulness, the prayer of the heart — as the living center of Orthodox spiritual life, in monasteries from Athos to America and among countless laypeople, rests substantially on the diffusion of the Philokalia. The “Philokalic revival” is now a recognized category in the study of modern Christian spirituality, and Nicodemus is its acknowledged source (Philokalia, Encyclopædia Britannica; see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

The revival reached far beyond the canonical Orthodox Church. The Philokalia and the Jesus Prayer entered Western Christian spirituality, the study of mysticism, and the wider modern search for contemplative practice; The Way of a Pilgrim and the English Philokalia are read by Catholics, Protestants, and seekers of no fixed tradition (see The Philokalia and Its Diffusion). Nicodemus the Athonite editor became, unforeseeably, a teacher of prayer to the modern world.

Forerunner of the Neo-Patristic Synthesis

Nicodemus’s influence runs not only through the Philokalia but through the method it embodies — the “return to the Fathers” (see The Patristic Mind). The dominant movement of twentieth-century Orthodox theology, the neo-patristic synthesis called for by Georges Florovsky and pursued by Vladimir Lossky, John Meyendorff, and others, was in essence the program Nicodemus and the Kollyvades had enacted two centuries earlier: the recovery of the patristic mind as the norm of Orthodox thought, and with it the recovery of hesychasm and the theology of St. Gregory Palamas — whose works Nicodemus had labored to edit and whose theology crowns the Philokalia (see The Evergetinos and the Synaxaristes and St. Gregory Palamas). The twentieth-century “Palamite renaissance” stands on foundations Nicodemus helped lay.

There is a genuine irony here worth naming. The Florovskian critique of the “Western captivity” of Orthodox theology — the very framework that questions Nicodemus’s borrowings from Scupoli and Pinamonti (see Discernment in Borrowing) — is itself the heir of Nicodemus’s return to the Fathers. Nicodemus is thus both a forerunner of the neo-patristic movement and, on the question of his Western sources, one of its case studies. The tension is real and is part of what makes him so interesting a figure in the modern Orthodox self-understanding.

The Channels of Transmission

Nicodemus’s influence flowed through identifiable channels, each treated elsewhere in this collection:

The Russian channel: through St. Paisius Velichkovsky’s Slavonic Dobrotolyubie and St. Theophan the Recluse’s Russian Dobrotolyubie and Unseen Warfare, into the Russian monastic and Optina revival (see St. Theophan the Recluse; St. Ambrose of Optina).
The Greek and Athonite channel: through the continuous reading of his works on the Holy Mountain and in the Greek world, into the modern Athonite revival and figures such as St. Paisios of Mount Athos, in whom the Philokalic and Kollyvades inheritance lives on (see St. Paisios).
The English-speaking and diaspora channel: through the mid-century and later English translations (Kadloubovsky and Palmer; Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware) and through the publishing labors of the Orthodox diaspora — including the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood and figures such as Fr. Seraphim Rose, who carried the Philokalic and patristic inheritance into English-speaking Orthodoxy (see Fr. Seraphim Rose).

The Scholarship

Modern scholarship on Nicodemus is substantial and growing, and this collection has drawn on its principal strands:

Constantine Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite (Modern Orthodox Saints, vol. 3; Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974) — the standard English-language life-and-works, the foundational reference for Nicodemus’s biography and the catalogue of his writings.
Elia Citterio — the Italian scholar whose detailed source-critical studies of Nicodemus’s works, especially the adaptations of the Western devotional books, map precisely what Nicodemus took, changed, and Orthodoxized; Citterio’s work is central to the balanced assessment of the Western-source question (see Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises).
Bishop Chrysostomos (of Etna) and other Orthodox writers who have studied the Kollyvades movement and Nicodemus’s place in it, situating him within the eighteenth-century renewal and the modern reception.
The translators’ introductions to the English Philokalia (Ware and Sherrard) and to Unseen Warfare (H. A. Hodges) and the Handbook (George Bebis), which constitute a substantial body of interpretive scholarship in their own right.
The broader historical and source-critical literature on the Kollyvades movement, the frequent-Communion controversy, and the Philokalic revival, including the work surveyed by John Sanidopoulos and others.

The scholarship is not univocal — on the Western sources especially, it ranges from warm defense to pointed critique (see the disputed note in Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises) — but it is unanimous on the central point: that Nicodemus the Hagiorite is one of the pivotal figures of modern Orthodox history, the editor-saint whose labors, more than any other single person’s, made the patristic and hesychast inheritance available to the modern Orthodox world.

A Final Measure

The truest measure of Nicodemus’s legacy is paradoxical. He sought no fame, founded nothing, governed no one; he spent his life at a desk, copying and correcting the words of others. And precisely because of that hidden, self-effacing labor, his influence is everywhere the Philokalia is read, everywhere the Jesus Prayer is prayed from its pages, everywhere the Fathers are taken as the living norm of Orthodox life. The monk from Naxos who wished only to serve the tradition became one of the chief shapers of modern Orthodoxy. It is the fitting legacy of a saint whose holiness was a kind of editing — the patient, prayerful, self-forgetting service of getting the right words into the right hands.

The Global Reach of the Philokalic Revival

The geographical and confessional breadth of the Philokalic revival is worth measuring more fully, for it is what raises Nicodemus from a figure of Greek Church history to a teacher of the modern world. From its Athonite origin in 1782, the anthology spread first into the Slavic world and then, in the twentieth century, into the English-speaking one, where the complete translation of Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware (1979–) placed it among the most widely read works of Christian spirituality of the age (Philokalia, Encyclopædia Britannica; see The Philokalia and Its Diffusion). Its reach did not stop at the canonical Orthodox Church: the Philokalia and the Jesus Prayer entered Roman Catholic and Protestant spirituality, the academic study of mysticism, and the broader contemporary search for contemplative practice, carried in part by the popularity of The Way of a Pilgrim, which dramatized the Philokalic prayer for a vast readership (see The Philokalia and Its Diffusion). The “Philokalic revival” is now a recognized category in the study of modern Christian spirituality, and Nicodemus is its acknowledged source — an Athonite editor who became, unforeseeably, a teacher of prayer to readers of every tradition and of none (Philokalia, Encyclopædia Britannica).

The Hidden Editor and the Vast Influence

There is a paradox at the heart of Nicodemus’s reception that the scholarship keeps returning to: the disproportion between the hiddenness of the man and the magnitude of his influence. He was an editor and compiler, not an original system-builder; much of what bears his stamp is the work of others that he gathered, arranged, corrected, and sent into circulation (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974). Yet it is precisely the editorial vocation — the choosing of texts, the writing of introductions, the labor of making a scattered tradition available and usable — that proved to have the longest reach, because it placed the Fathers themselves back into the hands of the Church (see The Patristic Mind). The modern study of Nicodemus has had, in a sense, to recover its own subject: to show that the self-effacing compiler was a decisive theological actor, and that the form of his sanctity — a holiness expressed through editing — is itself a thing worth understanding (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, 1974). The scholarship’s recurring task is to make visible an influence that worked, by design, through the words of others.

The Translators as Interpreters

A distinctive feature of the modern scholarship is that some of its most consequential work is embedded in translations rather than monographs. The introductions and apparatus that accompany the English Philokalia (Kallistos Ware and Philip Sherrard), Unseen Warfare (H. A. Hodges), and the Handbook of Spiritual Counsel (George S. Bebis) constitute a substantial body of interpretive scholarship, framing Nicodemus for the English reader and situating his works within the neptic and Kollyvades context (Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware, trans., The Philokalia: The Complete Text, London: Faber, 1979–; St. Nicodemus, A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Peter A. Chamberas, intro. George S. Bebis, New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1989). These prefatory essays have shaped how a generation of English-speaking readers understands Nicodemus, and they sit alongside the dedicated studies — Constantine Cavarnos’s standard English life-and-works, Elia Citterio’s source-critical mapping of the Western adaptations, and the surveys of the Kollyvades movement by Bishop Chrysostomos of Etna, John Sanidopoulos, and others — as part of a literature that is substantial, growing, and far from univocal (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, 1974; Citterio, source-critical studies; Sanidopoulos, “The Kollyvades Fathers,” johnsanidopoulos.com). On the Western sources especially the scholarship ranges from warm defense to pointed critique, yet it is unanimous on the central judgment: that Nicodemus the Hagiorite is one of the pivotal figures of modern Orthodox history.

References

Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite (Modern Orthodox Saints, vol. 3). Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974. The standard English life-and-works.
Citterio, Elia. Source-critical studies of Nicodemus’s writings and his adaptations of Western sources (Italian scholarship; see the surveys in the secondary literature). For the precise mapping of Nicodemus’s use and transformation of his sources.
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology and “St Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers.” For the neo-patristic synthesis and the “Western captivity” framework.
Palmer, G. E. H., Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware, trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text. London: Faber, 1979–. The translators’ introductions on the Philokalic revival and Nicodemus’s role.
Sanidopoulos, John. “The Kollyvades Fathers: The Renaissance of Greek Orthodoxy.” johnsanidopoulos.com (2020). On the movement, its leaders, and its reception.
Philokalia. Encyclopædia Britannica, britannica.com. (The diffusion and modern influence of the Philokalia.)
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. A Handbook of Spiritual Counsel, trans. Peter A. Chamberas, intro. George S. Bebis. New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press (Classics of Western Spirituality), 1989. (Bebis’s introduction among the translators’ interpretive scholarship.)